One Love, One Lifetime
a friend of mine gave me a copy of this article a few years ago, this is what i hope and strive for… i know i will find my angel soon…
In the sixteenth summer of my life, I fell in love for the first time. Naturally, I had no idea what I was going into. Youth for all its freshness and vigor, does not have the wisdom of past experience. And so it was that I was ill equipped when Cupid’s arrow first struck. I still had fairytale notions about love. Boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy and girl pledge undying love for each other, and they live happily ever after. I only had to find my Prince Charming, and everything would be smooth sailing. I was young and invincible. No sadness could touch me, especially in the arena of romance.
To young people, finding themselves drawn to someone for the first time, everything is wonderful and new. I read that love is like God’s fingers on your shoulder. Every beautiful thing in the world feels like it was made solely for your enjoyment, like a gift chosen with only you in mind. Perhaps the greatest of all those gifts is the sound of your heart catching in your throat at the sight of a boy smiling at you as though you, too, were a gift he cannot quite thank God enough for.
When I look back at the days when I was giddy with the first discovery of love, I find that the grass was greener, the air was fresher and even the sun was kinder, not sending its rays down to punish my back on sweltering afternoons, like it does now, but bathing me in its radiance so that I had the morning sunshine in my smile. The splendor of creation, the marvel of life – I had never tasted them more fully than when I had a heart grateful for the first touch of love. It felt like I had the whole world in my hands, the power to do whatever I pleased, in my own sweet time as soon as I had finished attending to the greater things at hand, such as the business of love. My prince had come on his white charger, to rescue me from my ordinary, solitary existence. Suddenly, I had someone to hold my hand. It was bliss. It was ecstasy. I was madly, truly, deeply in love.
I thought my happiness was without end. I thought that since we had naturally gravitated toward each other, It would be a simple thing to get to together and be sweethearts until our hearts gave out in our golden years. Of natural causes, not of exhaustion, like I don’t feel like loving you anymore. Of a coronary disease, maybe, not some mysterious happenstance, like where is the love we used to know?
Where did it go? I don’t know. Maybe it was too beautiful to last. Maybe the deities who bestowed this wondrous gift on me decided that they could not extend their generosity further. Maybe it wasn’t love at all. Maybe it was merely a sweet but insignificant friendship, that in my romantic delusion I had exaggerated into a grand love affair. Years of sleepless nights, countless tears and endless soul-searching have given me no answers.
But if it wasn’t love, what could it possibly have been? What was it that made me feel his presence like no other, day after day, month after month, year after year? He would walk into a room and my attention would immediately be riveted to him, like and oarsman in the dead of the night, fixing his eyes on the lighthouse miles and miles away. I would see him come out of a building and my eyes would be like incandescent bulbs. He would smile at me and I’d melt, quicker than you can say quickmelt. He would grant me the privilege of his company, and like a kitten I would purr contentedly in my master’s lap. I would see him over the weekend, and no amount of stress could ruin my happiness for the two weeks thereafter. He would talk to me for a while, and I’d panic for lack of something to say and my tongue would fall back in my throat and stay there for the rest of the conversation almost asphyxiating me. He would narrate some anecdote and I would recite it from memory many months after everyone else had forgotten it. He would crack one of his numerous jokes and I’d laugh like a hyena, loving the sound of his voice more than the sound of my own laughter. He would open his mouth to say something and I would hear the loveliest music and feel my face glow with intense satisfaction, like when my father used to take me to the supermarket to pick as many Dole pineapple juice cans off the shelves as I cared.
Even to this day, when I have successfully convinced myself and unsuccessfully convinced my friends that I have fallen out love with him, I cannot help but cast one glance everytime he says goodbye and starts to walk away to an existence entirely separate from my own. I keep my eyes on him until the last hair on his head is out of sight, trying to preserve every detail of his appearance in my memory until the time I will see him again.
I loved his smile most of all. It must have been the same smile that Noah had upon seeing the rainbow after the Great Flood. Swirling masses of dark clouds and slowly, one by one, little fingers of light covalence to reveal a brilliant arc of colored light in the sky. I remember how he used to smile at me when we’d pass each other in the school corridors. Reflexively, I’d smile back, grinning like silly, my meager dimples stretched up to my ears, my face dangerously close to splitting. He’d give me that dazzling smile of his and everything would just stop just like that. It was as if it was the vertiginous dance of my heart. When they said that money can’t buy happiness, they must have meant the happiness that comes from first love.
He gave me the greatest happiness as well as the greatest sadness of my young life. The times when he made me feel most loved will always be like commemorative gold coins in mint condition in my mind. When you hear your heart in unison with another even for the most fleeting moment, that’s one moment you’ll never forget.
I fell apart when it finally became clear that we weren’t getting anywhere, at least not together and that our great love affair was only being carried on in my imagination. Love is a woman’s existence, and mine became totally disordered. I could not sleep. I could not eat. I could not study. I could not do anything but think of him. I cannot imagine now, but there was a time when every thought was of him. I would be praying and I’d think of him, and then I’d pray, “Please God, I love him. Please let him love me again.” I would be eating, and then I’d recall some meal we had taken together in some restaurant I cannot enter now without him beside me again. I would be studying, and I’d remember how we used to chat merrily in the library while my hand was mechanically doing my homework. I would be sleeping and if I so much dreamt of his shadow, I’d be sleepless days afterward. I would be watching a love story, and no matter what the plot was, I would be looking at the stars in the sky and then I’d recite that childhood rhyme. Starlight, starbright/first, second, third, ad infinitum star I see tonight/ I wish I may, I wish I might/ have the wish I wish tonight, please grant me love anew. I would be living my life in the past all over again. Once, I nearly tore the entire tuning knob from the radio, switching stations because one song kept playing in the airwaves, telling me this is your story, when I was desperately trying to put a semblance of normality in my life (and trying to cram for finals).
Two years down the line, I discovered tennis and took out my frustrations on the hapless, fuzzy yellow balls. In no time at all I had excellent serve, but alas, I could not master the ground strokes.
I pined for him until I could not pine no longer. I kept my life empty for the longest time so that he could freely reenter anytime he wished. Now I realize that this was a great disservice to myself. In my great, tragic love for this person I had forgotten to love myself and became a victim of my own neglect. But then in the anguished life the young lead, they need drama to commensurate their hormonal levels, and my drama was wasting away for a boy I had lost. I guess, to college education.
Through it all I loved him very much. I loved him so much, as the cliché goes, I could not deny him his happiness. If he was happier with someone else, so be it. If he was happier with me only as a friend, so be it. Though it sometimes felt like I had a wound in my heart, it didn’t matter that he didn’t love me in return. I loved him anyway. When he’d wonder if there was a girl out for him, I could scarcely stop myself from screaming, “Here I am, you doofus, no need to go far”.
When he told his problems to someone else, I felt hurt, left out, unworthy. Maybe I could not have hiorthy. Maybe I could not have hiis friendship. When he did ask me for any favors to my inconvenience, I would whine inside but my brain would be in frenzy canceling appointments so I could be at his beck and call. I loved him so much that I felt it was massive injustice, tyranny even, that I could not have him, when I was probably the one who loves him most, after his mother. I could never let any harm come to him. Touch one hair on his head and I metamorphose into incredible Hulk and kill you.
Call it stupidity, call it insanity, call it obsession, call it infatuation, call it whatever you want, it was love, sweet, bittersweet love. With love, as with faith, if you believe, that’s justification enough, no explanation is necessary. If you do, no explanation is possible. When you are blessed enough to love, it will change you in so many ways you can never be the same again.
Love means different things to different people, different things at different times. Like everything, it changes. It waxes and wanes like the moon.
In all my years of loving one boy with all my heart can hold, I learned that no matter where I went, no matter what I did, no matter who I was with, there was only one person for me, no matter if he long ago ceased to feel the same way. It was not his fault that I was unhappy, for so long, it was simply my, misfortune, my cross to carry. In spite of everything, I am a better person, and I will forever be indebted to him for teaching me how it is to love. Never mind that his teaching was mostly done in absentia. I madly, deeply, truly loved him. I hope never to dishonor that love by engaging in cheap flings with whoever catches my fancy at the moment.
To me love is not a conquest, much less, one conquest after another. Conquest denotes subjugation, a submission to a more powerful will. You do not make a person submit to your will and mold him as you see fit to make him more lovable in your eyes. You love him for what he is. You do not gross over his imperfections, you learn to live with his flaws. You do not brag to your friends that he is yours for the taking, there is no braggadocio in love. You wait anxiously instead for the next time he tells you he loves you no matter if it may never happen and in the meantime, the uncertainty is making you miserable. You do not lead him on with the empty displays of affection. You do not boost his ego with false promises only to give him the ultimate putdown by taking him for a fool. You find yourself speechless with admiration and fear that the slightest touch will betray the depth of your emotion. You do not cry foul when the promise of love had not gone according to your fervent wishes. You do not bawl at him “How dare you tell me you love me, take my heart, and then disappear from my life.” You do not demand the return of glorious days past. You do not blame him for your shattered illusions and wayward dreams and least of all your broken heart. Even in the lowest troughs of self-pity and despair, you cannot bring yourself to cause him the slightest grief. You would rather die than give him the slightest hint that he has anything to do with your unhappiness. Love bears all – maybe not always with a smile that’s big enough for allthe world to see, but one that’s brave enough to tell him it’s okay, you’ll live so he doesn’t have to feel bad.
It’s never easy to lay open the door to your heart, because love and rejection get in the same way. Love is not for the fainthearted. I loved once and years later, am still reeling from it. Having survived oneheartbreak has not lessened my fear of going through another. Thus I envy people who can meet strangers and shortly afterward declare that they were meant for each other. I envy those who are not afraid to go after their happiness and damn the consequences. I envy people who can go from conquest to conquest without feeling diminished by it.
I can never be like them. I don’t think like them. Once you’ve tasted manna from heaven, why bother with bread from the baker? Nothing compares with it.
Until God sends me my angel on earth to love and too cherish forever, I will be content to be alone. I have learned to swallow my loneliness like a bitter pill, hoping my good behavior will make fate smile at me and say, “Here is the one for you. Live happily ever after, your name is written on his heart.”
One love, one lifetime – that is my hope. Not one conquest after another. As Sting says, that’s not the shape of my heart.
